


Played

by GloriaMundi



Category: Nova - Delany
Genre: Community: kink_bingo, Hand porn, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-03
Updated: 2009-07-03
Packaged: 2017-10-05 18:59:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/45038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GloriaMundi/pseuds/GloriaMundi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Katin can't stop thinking of the Mouse's hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Played

The Mouse's hands are solar sails, every gesture and movement transmuted by his cerebral socket to the flex and bend of flimsy silver in the ion stream between the stars. The Mouse's hands are also skin and muscle, flesh and nail and bone, scarred and smoothed with work, snaked by veins that frame the dull metal socket half the width of his wrist.

Katin can't stop thinking of the Mouse's hands. Their imprint is precise, still, on his skin, each finger placed with a care, a skill that is -- thinks Katin, his attention flickering between the Captain's commands in his ear and the closer, more vivid recollection of the night just past -- comparable to, yet wholly distinct from, the way the Mouse plays his sensory-syrynx, pulling ocean, ginger, autumn from its strings and frets as he pulls salt, musk, a breathless wordless sound from Katin's body.

Katin is ... played. A flutter of mothwings against the convex skin beneath his ribs: the shock of a resolved chord echoing in his middle ear, the sudden musky scent of his seed alchemised with the Mouse's sweat.

But still: the Mouse's hands.

The difference in our heights, muses Katin (belatedly angling a virtual limb to adjust their dizzying headlong plunge through the void), is laughable: yet when we lie down together, when he plays me and not the syrynx, it's easy, unstretched, unforced.

That one long fingernail the Mouse sports -- Katin has yet to ask what it means, what it's for, its cultural context -- spirals pain-pleasure from the soft hollow behind his knee along the plane of his thigh, slides inexorable and gentle into his urethra; the gnawed nails of the Mouse's right hand rasp ragged along the mountain-range of Katin's vertebrae, combing red lines across moon-pale skin like the scars of raining meteors.

Last night the Mouse played his sensory-syrynx in the commons, conjuring the architectural and artistic treasures of a dozen worlds for the crew of the _Rocinante_. Katin found himself staring at the Mouse's hands, watching the way that the Mouse's fingers -- their nails bitten to the quick, their tips callused, the knuckles knobs of bone -- moved on the syrynx, discovering the vaulted shade of a cathedral, the fall of stained-glass light across carved stone, the sough of air in organ pipes. He'd wanted to whisper his thoughts into the jewelled recorder that hangs at his belt: even the notion of vocalising those thoughts aloud, in the presence of others, made his skin prickle with heat. Those hands, he would have said. I want those hands to discover whatever it is in myself that I want, what I want but don't know. He would have paused: how can I want something and not know what it is?

The Mouse's hands bring something out of nothing, light and shade and sound and meaning out of the empty air. The Mouse's hands can surely bring something out of the aching emptiness that watching him has created in Katin.

Perhaps tonight Katin will touch him in return.

-end-


End file.
